With Charlie / Brian
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Common Mistakes in Putting Together Your Own Vidcast
Brian Peterson: Hello, I’m Brian Peterson.
Charlie Fulton: And I’m Charlie Fulton.
Brian Peterson: And welcome to Tips and Letters. We’re going to do just one letter today, because we’ve got a lot of tips. And this comes from us here at Videomaker, we are letting you in on our secrets. Frankly, we put together four parts series on how to put together your own vidcast, and we’re letting you learn by our mistakes. So, we’re going to spend some time on that.
But before we get to that, there’s this one letter from Jonathan Hass of Corvallis, Oregon, and he sums up a really, really good question that a lot of people have. And I’m going to read the first line, because it sums it up so well. When owning a camera with an LCD screen, one must take precaution so that they are not fooled by the deceitfulness of this overrated feature.
Now, overrated, I don’t know. I think we all have LCDs screens you like-
Charlie Fulton: Yeah.
Brian Peterson: But what’s really the kind of the challenge that he’s putting to us here?
Charlie Fulton: The challenge would be that if you were using, relying solely on your LCD, to determine the exposure that you’re getting or your color balance. And some, it’s display like any other that you’d be dealing with, CRT, LCD, plasma, whatever you’ve got. There’s almost certainly going to be some issues of, the color will change after it warms up, and more the stuff you find is 20 minutes, half hour or so. So that the display is actually performing at a speck, basically.
Brian Peterson: So, somebody turns their camera on right away, what you’re saying the color may not be truly representative of the color-
Charlie Fulton: Right.
Brian Peterson: probably less so for LCD, but even LCDs, they say a 30 minute warm up, 20 minutes, before you do any calibration, so that tells us that you do have that warm up here.
Charlie Fulton: Right. Yeah. So if you had something really, really critical, you’d either want to be using a production monitor that you’ve been warming up with some kind of the moving video for a while. Or just keep your camcorder handy. I guess you have to have it plugged, otherwise it would go to sleep on you. But then, after that, you would be ready to shoot. And be able to trust your camcorder.
Brian Peterson: And trust is what it’s all about. So let’s tell you how to trust your LCD screens. I think LCD screens aren’t going away.
Charlie Fulton: No.
Brian Peterson: In fact, they’re here to stay. So, let’s talk to you about how to trust it. We’re going to show you something that you probably saw if you’re older. 7 o’clock in the morning you see one of these. Color bars. So, pretty standard in the industry. And we’re not going to tell you necessarily how to use them, but just be aware that this is something that attempts to standardize the color that you see, the color that your camera sees, you normally get with just using the white balance. Correct?
Charlie Fulton: Right.
Brian Peterson: So, you’re kind of trusting your camera to get all these colors correct, and that’s fine. What we’re going to suggest you do, though, is two things.
One, why don’t you download a free trial of, we’re going to bring a plug serious magic here a couple of times. A program called DV Rack. Now, what that’ll do, it will load on your computer, and it’ll give you what, at least up until recently, was many thousands of dollars worth of test equipment. One being what’s called the way form monitor and a vector scope. With just a little bit of reading, it will do a good job of telling you how to use it. You can actually tweak your input into your camera while plugged in with just a DV connector. Just a DV FireWire connector.
Charlie Fulton: FireWire.
Brian Peterson: And you’ll see where your levels are actually at. So, white will be at a 100%, your colors will make little boxes in the vector scope, and it will tell you how to do that. But what that will give you is that trust you just talked about.
Charlie Fulton: Absolutely.
Brian Peterson: So, to trust your view finder and what it represents.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah, and that’s a great point. And software that, it’s not too expensive, it’s something to play with, definitely, to get-
Brian Peterson: Color correction.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah.
Brian Peterson: All right. Let’s move to part two of our four part series on producing your own vidcast. This is the fun part. We’re going to talk about actually producing the vidcast.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah.
Brian Peterson: This is kind of, what’s the word, oxymoronic? For producing a vidcast. Talking about vidcast.
Charlie Fulton: Or kind of a meta, maybe.
Brian Peterson: Meta ironic. Yeah. It sounds something like that.
All right. So, let’s break it down to what at least we defined as components, and folks, we’re not saying this is the way you have to do it, this is the way we’ve done it, so, this is developing so quickly that things change fast.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah.
Brian Peterson: The first thing you may want to consider is set design. And how much time you want to put into that. Now, I think we talked briefly the last time that we put together our own set, it was basically put together because we knew we’re going to have product on here. We even designed it so we can turn this thing around and actually do it as a stand up. We could have people walk onto the set, walk off of the set, if we wanted to do interviews in that way.
So this is a really multifunction table designed to serve purposes, frankly, we didn’t know we were going to need quite then.
Charlie Fulton: Right.
Brian Peterson: So, if you need to be that flexible, you might want to invest, I think it wasn’t that, a $100 or something like that, into a design that allows you to do that.
Are you going to use a monitor? Frequently, it’s kind of the standard fair, wouldn’t you say?
Charlie Fulton: I would say, yeah. Everybody seems to have one, in all the vidcasts that I’ve seen at least. I’m sure other vidcasts are using it too, so…
Brian Peterson: Well, and what you’ve not seen here actually is Charlie behind the scenes, when the new section is up, masterfully manipulating two computers going up at the same time, popping everything up in real time, so that’s one thing you want to consider, which actually brings us to a couple of other points.
We designed this so that it can be set up quickly, and repeatable. That means exactly in the same place, putting tape down on the floor, where you’re going to put things up. That includes the cameras themselves, the table, the monitor, just that repeatability makes sense.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah. Definitely. And if you’ve got to use your space for other purposes too, you definitely want this. But if you’ve got space where you can lock down, more power to you.
Brian Peterson: What about talent? Not suggesting we have any, it’s just a name for people that are in front of the camera.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah, well. The talent is sort of subjective, I suppose. You have to consider how many people you actually want on your vidcast. Now, we’ve got our whole editorial team here, we revolve through every segment as different team members here.
You can have a just one person vidcast, and that’s popularized by, say, Rocket Boom, or there was like the Geek Chick, I forget the exact name of it. I only saw that one a couple of times. Or you can have like, what was that one, digitalized TV where you’ve got Robert Heron and Patrick Norman, always there on set. And you can, it’s reliable, you should watch for these guys, they’re going to be there at whatever time they actually send up their RSS.
And another thing to consider is whether you want your talent to be ad libbing, like we are, we’ve gotten pretty good at this.
Brian Peterson: Yeah, I think so.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah.
Brian Peterson: (whispering loudly) Are you kidding? We’re reading from a script.
Charlie Fulton: Not on that one, actually. We’re not scripting here. Although, you could do a script, and if you really, really want to get into it, you can have a full teleprompter. It’s really up to you. Teleprompters are sort of pricey, though.
Brian Peterson: Which is a great segue. A segue, by the way, is a transition into the next thing.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah.
Brian Peterson: We want to give you inside tip. A Segue into another pit sells magazine. Believe me, it’s just a complete accident this happened this way. This happens to be a new product we’ve been waiting for a while, and it’s finally starting to ship. And it’s actually one of those pieces of software, actually, we mentioned it a couple of episodes back.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah.
Brian Peterson: That this is one thing you can use if you’re doing a really down-and-dirty version of a vidcast. Now, this is kind of vlogging or video blogging where most people are using simply a cam, or a webcam, on top of their computer monitor, and this serves as something, well not something, a teleprompter. You essentially read what’s on the screen, the pace is adjustable. I think we’ve all seen this work in prototype, really, really interesting piece of software.
One thing that we might suggest, though, is if you decide to do something this down-and-dirty is one way to make it look a lot better. Do some decent lighting. All you have to do is throw up some, even a lighting an umbrella is going to be so much nicer than what you might normally get otherwise. If you have the ability in your camera to adjust depth of field a little bit, open your iris up all the way, or aperture up, you have a limited depth of field, well, throw in the background out the focus. Really focus on you, the narrator, a lot better. This gets it a bit more filmic look to it.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah. Yeah.
Brian Peterson: All right. Crew. You’ve got to pay them. You’ve got to pay them.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah.
Brian Peterson: A lot of money. We have bagels today, don’t we?
Charlie Fulton: Yeah. Food is the bare minimum. Absolutely.
Brian Peterson: Actually, if your crew turns out to be your friends and family, or in our case where it’s not up here, gets to be crew.
Charlie Fulton: Right.
Brian Peterson: So… but there are a couple of things you want to think about. The traditional positions of crew members are that we’ve got a technical director, which right now is Andrew, and he’s doing a great job looking like he’s busy. You can tell, he’s got headphones on, he’s got a mixer in front of him, and he’s working them, both, both computers. Left and right brained, all at the same time.
So, if you have somebody behind the scenes manipulating everything, you have what’s usually a floor director. And, again, these aren’t names that you need to adopt, but somebody who’s on the floor, truly in charge of saying, hey, what camera to look at, and it’s, you could call him director, in general. Couldn’t you?
Charlie Fulton: I would say, yeah.
Brian Peterson: And that really plays to whoever is again, not here, over there.
So, the last position is, it can be multifunction, is audio. You have to have somebody in charge of taking care of audio, making sure you’re not over modulating that sort of thing.
Charlie Fulton: Right.
Brian Peterson: Moving on to equipment real quick. We’ve got lights, of course, you have that to consider. Do you want to go to broad light source, which is pretty much the safety, you can’t go wrong.
Charlie Fulton: Absolutely.
Brian Peterson: Not particularly flattering, it’s just, you know, big easy shot, no big deal. You’ll see the setup is not exactly in the same place every time. We have a back light that we’re using for our hair, those of us that have it. I’ll let you guess who else doesn’t.
And then a back round light, which we use cookaloris, or cookie, to throw a little bit of patterning on the background wall. And that actually was done a while ago, only for the purpose of hiding all the stains that we have on the wall.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah.
Brian Peterson: But actually, we had it painted, our production department did a great job painting the wall.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah, they really did.
Brian Peterson: Now, it’s probably not necessary, but it’s the habit now.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah. And it makes it a little bit more interesting back here, otherwise it’s just a plain boring white. Well, it’s extra, but still, it’s kind of boring and monotonous. Just a white egg shell type wall.
Brian Peterson: Yeah. And moving on to mikes. Microphone, actually, and you’ve probably noticed this, is something we’ve been challenged with ourselves. Our biggest challenge?
Charlie Fulton: Placement challenge, or if the mikes go out to different event, when we’ve got to go and try improvising. In one of the episodes we had a shotgun placed right here because we couldn’t use our lavaliers. But there’s a multitude of different mikes that you could try. If you wanted to try like a boundary mike somewhere, you could do that, although the sound of the boundary mike isn’t really great.
Brian Peterson: Yeah, if the boundary mike normally sits on the table or something, and then the thumping and that sort of thing. We found, we’ve settled on lavaliers right now. They seem to work when we have them.
So, again, repeatability, fresh batteries and making sure you’ve got decent cords and cabling.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah. Or, you can also use phantom power. But then, that requires a mixer that can handle it, and then it also requires good cables. Otherwise you’re going to have a lot of problems.
Brian Peterson: And if you’re running two cameras, you want to make sure that your output, whether coming directly from microphones themselves, or from a mixer, are going into your main camera, or your two shot camera. And that’s this one, I’m pointing at you right now. That camera is where the audio is going into, and that’s where we edit from, so…
You want to make sure that the main camera that never gets turned off, has the audio connected to it.
Moving on to video. Camera consideration. This is something we really haven’t played with. We’re using Canon XL2, a very, very good quality cameras, but frankly, it maybe, Andrew? Andrew?! You can answer this maybe.
This may be, when we get to the quality issue and encoding, I mean, we’re losing some quality. Correct? I mean, I think we have good quality, but could people get away with using a lesser camera than an XL2?
Andrew Burke: Is this on? I mean, can you hear me?
Charlie Fulton: You’re on channel 3.
Andrew Burke: I’m on channel 3.
Brian Peterson: All right. We might speak up.
Andrew Burke: Channel 3 is up, but -
Charlie Fulton: It might be muted.
Brian Peterson: This is a good example of audio right here.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah.
Andrew Burke: So, no, the answer is you have to use the $4500 camera.
Brian Peterson: All right.
Andrew Burke: A little more.
Brian Peterson: Being slightly prestigious, we could probably tell folks if you’ve got a camera that’s decent enough to shoot a regular video with. What you think?
Andrew Burke: Yeah, webcam probably wouldn’t be the best, but, I think you can get away with just about any consumer Prosumer camcorder.
Brian Peterson: So, we’re going up from a camcorder, you’re safe. At least you’re not locked into spending more money.
Charlie Fulton: Right.
Brian Peterson: For a camera. Consider the ratio, are you going to be shooting wide 16:9, or standard 4:3 we adopted. Why?
Charlie Fulton: Yeah. Some people say wider is better. We don’t know. We just wanted to be a little bit different. And our feedback user has been really positive. So, yeah, you know, tell us if you like it. We’re interested to hear more people.
We know that some iPods have a little bit of issue with it, but then, once you get past that, then you’re pretty much free.
Brian Peterson: And then whether or not you’ll decide to go progressive or interlaced. Many cameras are providing that feature right now. And we’ve decided to go with progressive. Not to say that interlaced won’t work at all, just that the p seems to work for us and our encoding methodology.
Charlie Fulton: Yes.
Brian Peterson: The other thing, if you’re using two cameras, we settled on that. We actually started with three, we were shooting with three to start with. We were treating this as much more like traditional television shoot than it really needed to be. And frankly, right now it still is probably more like a traditional television shoot.
But two cameras need two things. One, they both have to be rolling. And two, they need to be exposed the same. So make sure when you’re setting things up that you get the exposures right, so you can cut to your second camera, it’s either not very bright or really dark.
Charlie Fulton: That’s kind of something that you can sort of fix in post, but not always reliably, and it’s called-
Brian Peterson: Where, where’s the ruler?
Charlie Fulton: Yeah.
Brian Peterson: We don’t fix things in post.
Charlie Fulton: It’s also, this is another reason you don’t fix it in post, it’s time consuming. That’s time that you could have gotten your feed up much quicker than you actually did. So, be careful with that.
Some people even want to say, use the two identical cameras. And we agree with that, for the most part.
Brian Peterson: If you’ve got them. If you’ve got two identical cameras, absolutely.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah.
Brian Peterson: All right. Tripod – just make sure you have a sturdy one that’s capable of reframing and getting the same place, and definitely that you can lock it down well enough. I know some of the old tripods I used at the end of the cast would be doing this. So… just make sure you’ve got one you can lock down. It’s all it is.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah.
Brian Peterson: Final tip. Recording technology. And this is something that you really, in your planning stage you need to consider. Are you going to be recording to tape? And then dumping to post?
Charlie Fulton: Right.
Brian Peterson: Some others.
Charlie Fulton: You can also use a hard drive recorder, variously called, and ETE, or-
Brian Peterson: Just director cut.
Charlie Fulton: Just capture, yeah. Depending on who you’re asking. So what you would do is, after you shoot, take that drive, hook it directly to computer, and then that’s an hour that you saved that you don’t have to capture. If you captured an hour, let’s say.
And then also, if you’ve got two cameras, that multiplies your time savings right there.
Not all camcorders work with them, but as far as we know the investment, they even do.
Another way you could do it is to just take your footage directly to your computer via FireWire. And this works for the most part, except if you’ve got a computer that is making electrically noisy sounds.
Brian Peterson: So, if your AC is connected as your computer?
Charlie Fulton: Yes.
Brian Peterson: Who would know.
Charlie Fulton: And we ran this, yeah. Then you’ll have weird little staticky noises on your camera.
Brian Peterson: Camera through your audio.
Charlie Fulton: Right. Yeah, so this one thing, another thing to be careful of. If you want to do that.
You could also go live to tape. This is what we do. It’s easier, you don’t have to sync as many times with the audio. We have clap board somewhere where, every time that camera stops, oh, you’re trying to impress it right now there.
Brian Peterson: Yeah. There we go. So, using a clap board we save life to tape. What we do here is all one take stuff. We treat it like this is live, and if we mess up, sorry, it’s on the tape, so it gives us a lot of reason to sweat more.
Charlie Fulton: It’s also a good reason to consider using a cover shot, too. So if you have to go back to cut something out, you can plug that on B shot, and then, in the meantime, and then you’re compressing that old stuff out of your timeline. And then, at the end of the B shot, we take it and go back to you’re a shot. And there you are. It’s like nothing ever changed.
Brian Peterson: So, I think we covered it for the making it.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah.
Brian Peterson: If you have any questions, don’t ask us, just rewind this vidcast, and look at it again.
No, please, if you do have any questions, we always ask you to send us an e-mail to editor@videomaker.com, and we’ve got our blog at:
Charlie Fulton: www.videomaker.com/blog
Brian Peterson: And our forums at:
Charlie Fulton: videomaker.com/forums
Brian Peterson: Very good.
Charlie Fulton: Thank you.
Brian Peterson: All right, we’re going to go on to one of the best segments we love, showing reader projects. And this one is no exception. It’s going to be a fun one. So, join Jennifer and Morgan.
We’ll see you next time.
Brian Peterson: Hello, I’m Brian Peterson.
Charlie Fulton: And I’m Charlie Fulton.
Brian Peterson: And welcome to Tips and Letters. We’re going to do just one letter today, because we’ve got a lot of tips. And this comes from us here at Videomaker, we are letting you in on our secrets. Frankly, we put together four parts series on how to put together your own vidcast, and we’re letting you learn by our mistakes. So, we’re going to spend some time on that.
But before we get to that, there’s this one letter from Jonathan Hass of Corvallis, Oregon, and he sums up a really, really good question that a lot of people have. And I’m going to read the first line, because it sums it up so well. When owning a camera with an LCD screen, one must take precaution so that they are not fooled by the deceitfulness of this overrated feature.
Now, overrated, I don’t know. I think we all have LCDs screens you like-
Charlie Fulton: Yeah.
Brian Peterson: But what’s really the kind of the challenge that he’s putting to us here?
Charlie Fulton: The challenge would be that if you were using, relying solely on your LCD, to determine the exposure that you’re getting or your color balance. And some, it’s display like any other that you’d be dealing with, CRT, LCD, plasma, whatever you’ve got. There’s almost certainly going to be some issues of, the color will change after it warms up, and more the stuff you find is 20 minutes, half hour or so. So that the display is actually performing at a speck, basically.
Brian Peterson: So, somebody turns their camera on right away, what you’re saying the color may not be truly representative of the color-
Charlie Fulton: Right.
Brian Peterson: probably less so for LCD, but even LCDs, they say a 30 minute warm up, 20 minutes, before you do any calibration, so that tells us that you do have that warm up here.
Charlie Fulton: Right. Yeah. So if you had something really, really critical, you’d either want to be using a production monitor that you’ve been warming up with some kind of the moving video for a while. Or just keep your camcorder handy. I guess you have to have it plugged, otherwise it would go to sleep on you. But then, after that, you would be ready to shoot. And be able to trust your camcorder.
Brian Peterson: And trust is what it’s all about. So let’s tell you how to trust your LCD screens. I think LCD screens aren’t going away.
Charlie Fulton: No.
Brian Peterson: In fact, they’re here to stay. So, let’s talk to you about how to trust it. We’re going to show you something that you probably saw if you’re older. 7 o’clock in the morning you see one of these. Color bars. So, pretty standard in the industry. And we’re not going to tell you necessarily how to use them, but just be aware that this is something that attempts to standardize the color that you see, the color that your camera sees, you normally get with just using the white balance. Correct?
Charlie Fulton: Right.
Brian Peterson: So, you’re kind of trusting your camera to get all these colors correct, and that’s fine. What we’re going to suggest you do, though, is two things.
One, why don’t you download a free trial of, we’re going to bring a plug serious magic here a couple of times. A program called DV Rack. Now, what that’ll do, it will load on your computer, and it’ll give you what, at least up until recently, was many thousands of dollars worth of test equipment. One being what’s called the way form monitor and a vector scope. With just a little bit of reading, it will do a good job of telling you how to use it. You can actually tweak your input into your camera while plugged in with just a DV connector. Just a DV FireWire connector.
Charlie Fulton: FireWire.
Brian Peterson: And you’ll see where your levels are actually at. So, white will be at a 100%, your colors will make little boxes in the vector scope, and it will tell you how to do that. But what that will give you is that trust you just talked about.
Charlie Fulton: Absolutely.
Brian Peterson: So, to trust your view finder and what it represents.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah, and that’s a great point. And software that, it’s not too expensive, it’s something to play with, definitely, to get-
Brian Peterson: Color correction.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah.
Brian Peterson: All right. Let’s move to part two of our four part series on producing your own vidcast. This is the fun part. We’re going to talk about actually producing the vidcast.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah.
Brian Peterson: This is kind of, what’s the word, oxymoronic? For producing a vidcast. Talking about vidcast.
Charlie Fulton: Or kind of a meta, maybe.
Brian Peterson: Meta ironic. Yeah. It sounds something like that.
All right. So, let’s break it down to what at least we defined as components, and folks, we’re not saying this is the way you have to do it, this is the way we’ve done it, so, this is developing so quickly that things change fast.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah.
Brian Peterson: The first thing you may want to consider is set design. And how much time you want to put into that. Now, I think we talked briefly the last time that we put together our own set, it was basically put together because we knew we’re going to have product on here. We even designed it so we can turn this thing around and actually do it as a stand up. We could have people walk onto the set, walk off of the set, if we wanted to do interviews in that way.
So this is a really multifunction table designed to serve purposes, frankly, we didn’t know we were going to need quite then.
Charlie Fulton: Right.
Brian Peterson: So, if you need to be that flexible, you might want to invest, I think it wasn’t that, a $100 or something like that, into a design that allows you to do that.
Are you going to use a monitor? Frequently, it’s kind of the standard fair, wouldn’t you say?
Charlie Fulton: I would say, yeah. Everybody seems to have one, in all the vidcasts that I’ve seen at least. I’m sure other vidcasts are using it too, so…
Brian Peterson: Well, and what you’ve not seen here actually is Charlie behind the scenes, when the new section is up, masterfully manipulating two computers going up at the same time, popping everything up in real time, so that’s one thing you want to consider, which actually brings us to a couple of other points.
We designed this so that it can be set up quickly, and repeatable. That means exactly in the same place, putting tape down on the floor, where you’re going to put things up. That includes the cameras themselves, the table, the monitor, just that repeatability makes sense.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah. Definitely. And if you’ve got to use your space for other purposes too, you definitely want this. But if you’ve got space where you can lock down, more power to you.
Brian Peterson: What about talent? Not suggesting we have any, it’s just a name for people that are in front of the camera.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah, well. The talent is sort of subjective, I suppose. You have to consider how many people you actually want on your vidcast. Now, we’ve got our whole editorial team here, we revolve through every segment as different team members here.
You can have a just one person vidcast, and that’s popularized by, say, Rocket Boom, or there was like the Geek Chick, I forget the exact name of it. I only saw that one a couple of times. Or you can have like, what was that one, digitalized TV where you’ve got Robert Heron and Patrick Norman, always there on set. And you can, it’s reliable, you should watch for these guys, they’re going to be there at whatever time they actually send up their RSS.
And another thing to consider is whether you want your talent to be ad libbing, like we are, we’ve gotten pretty good at this.
Brian Peterson: Yeah, I think so.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah.
Brian Peterson: (whispering loudly) Are you kidding? We’re reading from a script.
Charlie Fulton: Not on that one, actually. We’re not scripting here. Although, you could do a script, and if you really, really want to get into it, you can have a full teleprompter. It’s really up to you. Teleprompters are sort of pricey, though.
Brian Peterson: Which is a great segue. A segue, by the way, is a transition into the next thing.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah.
Brian Peterson: We want to give you inside tip. A Segue into another pit sells magazine. Believe me, it’s just a complete accident this happened this way. This happens to be a new product we’ve been waiting for a while, and it’s finally starting to ship. And it’s actually one of those pieces of software, actually, we mentioned it a couple of episodes back.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah.
Brian Peterson: That this is one thing you can use if you’re doing a really down-and-dirty version of a vidcast. Now, this is kind of vlogging or video blogging where most people are using simply a cam, or a webcam, on top of their computer monitor, and this serves as something, well not something, a teleprompter. You essentially read what’s on the screen, the pace is adjustable. I think we’ve all seen this work in prototype, really, really interesting piece of software.
One thing that we might suggest, though, is if you decide to do something this down-and-dirty is one way to make it look a lot better. Do some decent lighting. All you have to do is throw up some, even a lighting an umbrella is going to be so much nicer than what you might normally get otherwise. If you have the ability in your camera to adjust depth of field a little bit, open your iris up all the way, or aperture up, you have a limited depth of field, well, throw in the background out the focus. Really focus on you, the narrator, a lot better. This gets it a bit more filmic look to it.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah. Yeah.
Brian Peterson: All right. Crew. You’ve got to pay them. You’ve got to pay them.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah.
Brian Peterson: A lot of money. We have bagels today, don’t we?
Charlie Fulton: Yeah. Food is the bare minimum. Absolutely.
Brian Peterson: Actually, if your crew turns out to be your friends and family, or in our case where it’s not up here, gets to be crew.
Charlie Fulton: Right.
Brian Peterson: So… but there are a couple of things you want to think about. The traditional positions of crew members are that we’ve got a technical director, which right now is Andrew, and he’s doing a great job looking like he’s busy. You can tell, he’s got headphones on, he’s got a mixer in front of him, and he’s working them, both, both computers. Left and right brained, all at the same time.
So, if you have somebody behind the scenes manipulating everything, you have what’s usually a floor director. And, again, these aren’t names that you need to adopt, but somebody who’s on the floor, truly in charge of saying, hey, what camera to look at, and it’s, you could call him director, in general. Couldn’t you?
Charlie Fulton: I would say, yeah.
Brian Peterson: And that really plays to whoever is again, not here, over there.
So, the last position is, it can be multifunction, is audio. You have to have somebody in charge of taking care of audio, making sure you’re not over modulating that sort of thing.
Charlie Fulton: Right.
Brian Peterson: Moving on to equipment real quick. We’ve got lights, of course, you have that to consider. Do you want to go to broad light source, which is pretty much the safety, you can’t go wrong.
Charlie Fulton: Absolutely.
Brian Peterson: Not particularly flattering, it’s just, you know, big easy shot, no big deal. You’ll see the setup is not exactly in the same place every time. We have a back light that we’re using for our hair, those of us that have it. I’ll let you guess who else doesn’t.
And then a back round light, which we use cookaloris, or cookie, to throw a little bit of patterning on the background wall. And that actually was done a while ago, only for the purpose of hiding all the stains that we have on the wall.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah.
Brian Peterson: But actually, we had it painted, our production department did a great job painting the wall.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah, they really did.
Brian Peterson: Now, it’s probably not necessary, but it’s the habit now.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah. And it makes it a little bit more interesting back here, otherwise it’s just a plain boring white. Well, it’s extra, but still, it’s kind of boring and monotonous. Just a white egg shell type wall.
Brian Peterson: Yeah. And moving on to mikes. Microphone, actually, and you’ve probably noticed this, is something we’ve been challenged with ourselves. Our biggest challenge?
Charlie Fulton: Placement challenge, or if the mikes go out to different event, when we’ve got to go and try improvising. In one of the episodes we had a shotgun placed right here because we couldn’t use our lavaliers. But there’s a multitude of different mikes that you could try. If you wanted to try like a boundary mike somewhere, you could do that, although the sound of the boundary mike isn’t really great.
Brian Peterson: Yeah, if the boundary mike normally sits on the table or something, and then the thumping and that sort of thing. We found, we’ve settled on lavaliers right now. They seem to work when we have them.
So, again, repeatability, fresh batteries and making sure you’ve got decent cords and cabling.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah. Or, you can also use phantom power. But then, that requires a mixer that can handle it, and then it also requires good cables. Otherwise you’re going to have a lot of problems.
Brian Peterson: And if you’re running two cameras, you want to make sure that your output, whether coming directly from microphones themselves, or from a mixer, are going into your main camera, or your two shot camera. And that’s this one, I’m pointing at you right now. That camera is where the audio is going into, and that’s where we edit from, so…
You want to make sure that the main camera that never gets turned off, has the audio connected to it.
Moving on to video. Camera consideration. This is something we really haven’t played with. We’re using Canon XL2, a very, very good quality cameras, but frankly, it maybe, Andrew? Andrew?! You can answer this maybe.
This may be, when we get to the quality issue and encoding, I mean, we’re losing some quality. Correct? I mean, I think we have good quality, but could people get away with using a lesser camera than an XL2?
Andrew Burke: Is this on? I mean, can you hear me?
Charlie Fulton: You’re on channel 3.
Andrew Burke: I’m on channel 3.
Brian Peterson: All right. We might speak up.
Andrew Burke: Channel 3 is up, but -
Charlie Fulton: It might be muted.
Brian Peterson: This is a good example of audio right here.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah.
Andrew Burke: So, no, the answer is you have to use the $4500 camera.
Brian Peterson: All right.
Andrew Burke: A little more.
Brian Peterson: Being slightly prestigious, we could probably tell folks if you’ve got a camera that’s decent enough to shoot a regular video with. What you think?
Andrew Burke: Yeah, webcam probably wouldn’t be the best, but, I think you can get away with just about any consumer Prosumer camcorder.
Brian Peterson: So, we’re going up from a camcorder, you’re safe. At least you’re not locked into spending more money.
Charlie Fulton: Right.
Brian Peterson: For a camera. Consider the ratio, are you going to be shooting wide 16:9, or standard 4:3 we adopted. Why?
Charlie Fulton: Yeah. Some people say wider is better. We don’t know. We just wanted to be a little bit different. And our feedback user has been really positive. So, yeah, you know, tell us if you like it. We’re interested to hear more people.
We know that some iPods have a little bit of issue with it, but then, once you get past that, then you’re pretty much free.
Brian Peterson: And then whether or not you’ll decide to go progressive or interlaced. Many cameras are providing that feature right now. And we’ve decided to go with progressive. Not to say that interlaced won’t work at all, just that the p seems to work for us and our encoding methodology.
Charlie Fulton: Yes.
Brian Peterson: The other thing, if you’re using two cameras, we settled on that. We actually started with three, we were shooting with three to start with. We were treating this as much more like traditional television shoot than it really needed to be. And frankly, right now it still is probably more like a traditional television shoot.
But two cameras need two things. One, they both have to be rolling. And two, they need to be exposed the same. So make sure when you’re setting things up that you get the exposures right, so you can cut to your second camera, it’s either not very bright or really dark.
Charlie Fulton: That’s kind of something that you can sort of fix in post, but not always reliably, and it’s called-
Brian Peterson: Where, where’s the ruler?
Charlie Fulton: Yeah.
Brian Peterson: We don’t fix things in post.
Charlie Fulton: It’s also, this is another reason you don’t fix it in post, it’s time consuming. That’s time that you could have gotten your feed up much quicker than you actually did. So, be careful with that.
Some people even want to say, use the two identical cameras. And we agree with that, for the most part.
Brian Peterson: If you’ve got them. If you’ve got two identical cameras, absolutely.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah.
Brian Peterson: All right. Tripod – just make sure you have a sturdy one that’s capable of reframing and getting the same place, and definitely that you can lock it down well enough. I know some of the old tripods I used at the end of the cast would be doing this. So… just make sure you’ve got one you can lock down. It’s all it is.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah.
Brian Peterson: Final tip. Recording technology. And this is something that you really, in your planning stage you need to consider. Are you going to be recording to tape? And then dumping to post?
Charlie Fulton: Right.
Brian Peterson: Some others.
Charlie Fulton: You can also use a hard drive recorder, variously called, and ETE, or-
Brian Peterson: Just director cut.
Charlie Fulton: Just capture, yeah. Depending on who you’re asking. So what you would do is, after you shoot, take that drive, hook it directly to computer, and then that’s an hour that you saved that you don’t have to capture. If you captured an hour, let’s say.
And then also, if you’ve got two cameras, that multiplies your time savings right there.
Not all camcorders work with them, but as far as we know the investment, they even do.
Another way you could do it is to just take your footage directly to your computer via FireWire. And this works for the most part, except if you’ve got a computer that is making electrically noisy sounds.
Brian Peterson: So, if your AC is connected as your computer?
Charlie Fulton: Yes.
Brian Peterson: Who would know.
Charlie Fulton: And we ran this, yeah. Then you’ll have weird little staticky noises on your camera.
Brian Peterson: Camera through your audio.
Charlie Fulton: Right. Yeah, so this one thing, another thing to be careful of. If you want to do that.
You could also go live to tape. This is what we do. It’s easier, you don’t have to sync as many times with the audio. We have clap board somewhere where, every time that camera stops, oh, you’re trying to impress it right now there.
Brian Peterson: Yeah. There we go. So, using a clap board we save life to tape. What we do here is all one take stuff. We treat it like this is live, and if we mess up, sorry, it’s on the tape, so it gives us a lot of reason to sweat more.
Charlie Fulton: It’s also a good reason to consider using a cover shot, too. So if you have to go back to cut something out, you can plug that on B shot, and then, in the meantime, and then you’re compressing that old stuff out of your timeline. And then, at the end of the B shot, we take it and go back to you’re a shot. And there you are. It’s like nothing ever changed.
Brian Peterson: So, I think we covered it for the making it.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah.
Brian Peterson: If you have any questions, don’t ask us, just rewind this vidcast, and look at it again.
No, please, if you do have any questions, we always ask you to send us an e-mail to editor@videomaker.com, and we’ve got our blog at:
Charlie Fulton: www.videomaker.com/blog
Brian Peterson: And our forums at:
Charlie Fulton: videomaker.com/forums
Brian Peterson: Very good.
Charlie Fulton: Thank you.
Brian Peterson: All right, we’re going to go on to one of the best segments we love, showing reader projects. And this one is no exception. It’s going to be a fun one. So, join Jennifer and Morgan.
We’ll see you next time.
